Martin Kulhánek

"You basically have three options - they explain it to us by psychology - that when under attack, you either run away, or you freeze, or you fight. No one can really tell, though, because you just don't get into that situation in this country. Even though they do commando courses and all kinds of very tough courses, it's just not a situation where somebody really wants to shoot you. If I can say this, the thing I'm most proud of with regard to myself, out of my entire military career, is not leaving my guys behind. Given what this country has put into me in training, in money, what I've put into this in terms of my time, and what my family put into this by me being absent from home, I passed the test. I can look anybody in the eye at any time and say, me and my buddies I was there with for seven months at the forward base and spent... I didn't go there for nothing and I can look myself in the face and say, okay, you reacted the way you're supposed to as a professional soldier - the way it's been drilled into you, the way it's somewhere inside of you and probably will be for the rest of your career, maybe for the rest of your life."

"It had its pitfalls in that those guys had very little to no education. While I learned to speak Dari and Pashto in three months enough to converse with them, they did not learn English enough. When we tried to explain the topography and maps to them, they were unable to read what was written on the maps with Afghan labels. We tried to explain cardinal points, something children learn in primary schools in our country, to someone who'd never left the village, or maybe was in the army and was always led somewhere... and he's looking at the compass needle pointing north and wondering why it's like that. Then two months later, when they thought we were Americans, we explained to them that we were not by drawing a map of the world in the dirt with a stick and explaining where they were on the globe and where we were and that we're not Americans because they're across the ocean. So we also educated them in some way, not just in the military craft, and it was kind of Comenius. I felt like, this may sound hyperbolic, like a teacher of nations where we were trying to teach them everything through play, because this worked for us. When we were learning aeromobile operations, because we were going to fly them to provide some sort of outer cordon for a unit that was going to get some bad guys in another village, we would set up two rows of seats and make pallet doors open, plastic doors, and where they were supposed to go and where they weren't supposed to go, and we used these little magnets, bottle tops to show them where to move when they were doing what tactical maneuver."